There’s a great way of making money from your music and merch that’s so underground that most likely neither you nor anyone you know has heard of it. Actually, it’s the underground of the underground.

The main reason so few musicians are doing it is, I think, that most don’t know anyone else doing it. Or it seems like too much work. Or they can’t believe they can actually make money from their music, or something.

It isn’t a lot of work, really. The selling bit runs on automation – once it’s all written up it runs on automatic pilot, and only needs to be updated when you bring out a new album, which surely isn’t all that often.

The other part of the equation is finding prospective buying fans from the internet, and directing them to your sales pages. This part is ongoing and you could call it “work”, but that depends on your definition of work. If you like talking about music and bands you like, instruments you play and all that sort of thing, it just might not feel like work. Especially if you only need to write 140 characters at a time. [Read more…]

A great way to get more people to read your blog is by doing guest posts on OTHER people’s blogs. People reading the other blog read your article, which will include one or two links to your own blog. If they like your article they will often click through to your blog, and if you engage them, you’ll have some new readers.

Not only do the links from the other blog bring you new readers, it also gives your blog those much sought-after incoming links, which help boost your blog in the search engine rankings, making ALL your posts more likely to be discovered by random people doing Google searches. [Read more…]

Blogging can be a very valuable for musicians. It helps you engage with your existing fans… they get to know you better and their feelings about you become more personal, so they are more likely to support you, simply because they like you, or feel a bond with you.

This support includes buying your music and merch, coming to your shows, and talking about you, online and in real life.

Blogging can also bring in new fans from around the internet, through commenting on other blogs and doing guest posts. [Read more…]

A musician friend of mine recently wrote on his Facebook wall “if there is anything that’s cringeworthy… it’s self promo” and then went on to invite friends to Like his newly created Facebook musician page.

I don’t think he is alone. Probably quite a few of us kinda know there’s nothing wrong with promoting ourselves and our projects, but still somehow cringe at the idea.

As far as music marketing goes, it’s probably not surprising people feel like this, because the publicity efforts of some musicians are relentless… endless Facebook invites to endless small gigs, lots of talk about themselves. [Read more…]

Rendezvox will be about anything to do with the indie music scene… for the uninitiated, indie music is music created by artists who are not signed by the major record labels. They are independent.

In recent years the big record labels have been struggling more and more, as new alternative opportunities for music fans to obtain music have appeared. This has meant they have been even less likely than before to support developing artists, and stay with them for the long haul.

As a result it has become almost impossible for musicians to get a recording contract. Labels are only interested if they think an artist is extremely marketable… read young, pretty, can dance, and sounds vaguely saleable after generous helpings of autotune. Even when a genuinely talented artist does score a recording contract, they can suffer the fate of being dropped quickly, or having their albums stay on the shelves, not decently promoted. [Read more…]